Thought I would post an update. My speed problem was related to two things.
#1 My graphics drivers, which you guys warned me about.
#2 RAM. My HTPC only had a single stick. I completely forgot that a couple of months ago I had taken out a stick for testing on another machine and didn't put it back in. I finally noticed this yesterday when I fired up htop and it reported only 4GB of RAM, I thought, "that's not right, I had 8GB..." I put the other stick back in and there was a significant speedup. Dual channel helps .
Now the A8-7600 plays Mario Kart at 60 fps easily at stock settings on my 1080p TV. I can bump it up to 1.5x native resolution and still get 60 fps. I cannot do 2x or any anti-aliasing, but that's fine by me, being able to play at 1.5x native resolution is enough of an improvement for me. It gets better though....
I had an old A4-4000 AMD APU lying around so I decided to test that. I wasn't expecting much because it's a lower spec. APU. However I was pleasantly suprised to see it play Mario Kart Wii at 60 FPS at 1.5x native resolution! The FPS can sometimes dip below 60. At the opening of the racing scenes it can sometimes drop to 30-40 but during the race it stays at 57-60 fps. As wtih the A8-7600, I wasn't able to do any anti-aliasing without a significant fps drop (this was expected though). Anyway, I think this is very impressive performance on such a low spec APU.
The specs on these two APUs are...
A8-7600, 3.1 GHz, 3.8 GHz Turbo, 384 GPU cores at 720 MHz (Kaveri)
A4-4000, 3.0 GHz, 3.2 GHz Turbo, 128 GPU cores at 720 MHz (Richland)
One final question... The A4-4000 does well at 1.5x NR, but the A8-7600 does better. Is this performance due more to the CPU speed or the number of GPU cores? I'm guessing CPU speed since I see over and over that emulation is a CPU intensive process, but I just thought I'd ask
#1 My graphics drivers, which you guys warned me about.
#2 RAM. My HTPC only had a single stick. I completely forgot that a couple of months ago I had taken out a stick for testing on another machine and didn't put it back in. I finally noticed this yesterday when I fired up htop and it reported only 4GB of RAM, I thought, "that's not right, I had 8GB..." I put the other stick back in and there was a significant speedup. Dual channel helps .
Now the A8-7600 plays Mario Kart at 60 fps easily at stock settings on my 1080p TV. I can bump it up to 1.5x native resolution and still get 60 fps. I cannot do 2x or any anti-aliasing, but that's fine by me, being able to play at 1.5x native resolution is enough of an improvement for me. It gets better though....
I had an old A4-4000 AMD APU lying around so I decided to test that. I wasn't expecting much because it's a lower spec. APU. However I was pleasantly suprised to see it play Mario Kart Wii at 60 FPS at 1.5x native resolution! The FPS can sometimes dip below 60. At the opening of the racing scenes it can sometimes drop to 30-40 but during the race it stays at 57-60 fps. As wtih the A8-7600, I wasn't able to do any anti-aliasing without a significant fps drop (this was expected though). Anyway, I think this is very impressive performance on such a low spec APU.
The specs on these two APUs are...
A8-7600, 3.1 GHz, 3.8 GHz Turbo, 384 GPU cores at 720 MHz (Kaveri)
A4-4000, 3.0 GHz, 3.2 GHz Turbo, 128 GPU cores at 720 MHz (Richland)
One final question... The A4-4000 does well at 1.5x NR, but the A8-7600 does better. Is this performance due more to the CPU speed or the number of GPU cores? I'm guessing CPU speed since I see over and over that emulation is a CPU intensive process, but I just thought I'd ask